a state of chaos

I can't believe we are going through this with our lovebug's mom again.....a year later. Mom seems very confused and torn about what she wants to do. It is getting much to hard for our lovebug. She is angry, confused, sad and is in desperate need of some stability.
Brian and i are giving her a couple of weeks and then we are going to make the decision for her. We are waiting for the caseworkers to get back from vacation, tried calling both of the ones involved during the case and they are both on vaca till next week. I am sure the case is still open but i am not positive, i want their insight and i want to make sure they know what is going on and that mom is having second thoughts once again. We also want to give mom a chance to work through her feelings, i believe she is close to making a decision and i honestly don't know what she wants to do. If she cannot make a decision then brian and i will have to decide and the only decision we can make is to end visits with our lovebug.
Our lovebug is just having such a hard time going back and forth between the two homes. She is in a state of chaos right now and it makes my heart break to see her like this. She is not the same little girl. She hits, throws fits, refuses affection and cries a lot. I can't imagine how torn up she is inside and how confused she is feeling.
She wants to be with us. She says this everytime. She cries when she goes home, like sobbing, deep in her heart crying. She tells me she wants to live with us 'all the time'. I hope her mom can see beyond her own feelings and do the right thing for our lovebug. I hope she can see how happy our lovebug is with us. I hope she will let her stay with us. If not, then the only other option is to stop our visits and let our lovebug settle into her life with her mom, whether or not that is what she really needs or wants.
The next couple of weeks will be rough.

Thy will be done

scared to tell anyone about our lovebug possibly coming home to us. I have posted it here on my blog (not sure many people read this)and i have told my mom. i just know that we have been here before, and it didn't work out the last time. she told us the same thing this last may. she wants her to be happy, she wouldn't want her with anyone else but us. we have just texted back and forth. i think it is easier for her to express herself through texts. she is not a face to face, conversation type person. we decided that our lovebug would start staying the week with us on the tuesday after christmas. i will see her on saturday and i am hoping we can have a conversation about how this is going to work, what she is expecting, what this all really means?????

i just keep waiting for the call/text telling me that she has changed her mind :(

i am having a hard time sleeping, i am nervous and i am eating everything in sight. to say the least, i am a little stressed. not that the holidays aren't stressful enough.

i just pray with all my heart, all my soul and with all that is me that our lovebug will come home to us. i pray her mom will love her enough to let her go, to allow her to be happy. i pray she will trust me and brian. i pray she has the strength and support to make this decision and be happy with it and just. let. it. happen.

life-changing day

I don't even know what to write about at this minute. I am trying to soak it all in, and decide exactly what it all means for me, brian and our family.

Isabelle's mom decided this morning that she would like for isabelle to stay with us during the week and she would spend the weekend with her mom.

The boys' parents rights were terminated today.

I am in shock right now, i don't believe it and i hope that writing it, posting it and letting you read it will make it all seem real to me.

It may take a few days.........

baggage, the continuation

Thankfully brian and i talked and we have made some decisions about the contact the boys will have with brian's mother. It is a real tough situation and i am so proud of brian for standing up for not only the boys but for himself too. It is very hard to do when the person who is doing the hurtful things is your own mother. I am lucky to have such a wonderful, strong and self confident husband and partner in my life. He has always put us first and now he is prepared to put our family first.
Brian feels the same way that i do, his mother will always see the boys as his brother's boys. I find this incredibly disrespectful. We are the ones taking care of these boys. We hold them, we love them, we are responsible for their education, we take care of them when they are sick, provide for them financially, emotionally, physically......etc. I can't even imagine someone not seeing these boys as ours. How could you think of these boys as being the children of someone who has not been able to provide for them in any sort of capacity? delusional. We talked about contact with his mother and we decided that if she wants to see the boys, she needs to come here to our house to see them. Not only his mother but the bio parents too. When the time comes for the parents to have contact with the boys, it is going to be at our house or here in our town, some place where the boys are comfortable and feel safe and secure. The boys are never going to go see their parents or their grandmother. They are going to come see them. It is very symbolic of the relationship i want the boys to have with their bio parents and grandmother. The boys have been through enough, they have had a lot put on them and they have been responsible for making their parents happy for far too long. It is now the parents turn to make the effort and they will be the ones responsible for making the drive to come see the boys. It is no longer the boy's responsibility.
I don't even know when the parents will have physical visit with the boys again. It might be awhile. I can't imagine how unstable and worried the boys must feel. They have been in our home for almost 3 months now, it is not nearly long enough for them to feel like another move will not happen. They have moved around too much and it is going to take a long time for them to be able to see their parents and not worry about having to move or have all those feelings that come with being neglected by them. They will never see their parents again and not have anxiety. I just want them to have the tools to deal with their feelings, to be able to express themselves and to work through it with our help and our love and understanding. We are not even close to that kind of understanding ~ it is going to take awhile and i want the boys prepared for when the day comes when they do see their parents or their grandmother.

baggage

I have blogged a little about how hard it is to take care of family instead of a foster child. It carries a lot of extra relationship baggage that i didn't have when caring for our lovebug. The relationship with the children's parents or the children's other family members doesn't just depend on how the children were/are treated by these people but the relationship also depends on the relationship that i have had with them in the past. I know A LOT more about the boys' family then i have ever known or will know about lovebug's family. Unfortunately, i have not had a great relationship with them in the past. It is hard to separate my feelings for 'brian's family' from 'the boys' family'. I haven't had to deal with it much yet but it is something i am going to have to deal with in the near future and i am going to have to figure out what type of a relationship i want with the boys' family and how much i want them involved with the boys. It is a lot to think about.
Surprisingly my biggest worry concerns brian's mom, the boys' grandma. Ugh. This is going to be rough. Brian's mom has never liked me. We have had our moments where we have been able to get along but it deteriorates quickly. She feels like i disrespected her in the beginning of mine and brian's relationship and she has treated me badly ever since. She literally did not say one word to me on my wedding day! Seriously. I have a lot of hurt feelings when it comes to her and after 8 years of being treated this way, i told brian two years ago that i was done trying. She refuses to apologize for any of her actions and doesn't believe she has done anything wrong. There is no way to mend a relationship when only one person is willing to do the work. I feel like i have tried and i refuse to put myself in any situation where i will be treated rudely or disrespectfully. I have been happy with my decision and i am fortunate that brian has understood my feelings. He has seen the way i have been treated and he does not expect me to 'suck it up and take it'. I have never expected or asked brian to not have a relationship with his mother, i have never given him an ultimatum to choose. He goes to his mother's house by himself and i let him have his time with his mom, he goes over there whenever he wants. He is an adult and and he can make those decisions for himself. I don't have to be there to protect him, to buffer the snide remarks and reassure him that her behavior should not affect his image of himself. This leads me to my dilemma. I don't know what kind of contact i am going to want to allow with the boys grandma, brian's mom, my mother-in-law. The boys are young and have no way to communicate if they feel uncomfortable, threatened or sad. She is very strait forward and tells you what she thinks. She doesn't hold back! She sees these boys as brian's brother's boys, and right now they are his boys. And in some way they will always be his boys. But i am hoping that one day the boys will be our boys. They are going to be my sons and brian's sons and i don't know that she will ever see it that way. She gets something in her mind and that's the way it is! I don't know what she will say to the boys or if she doesn't say it to the boys what is she going to be talking about with the grown-ups when the boys are around her? If she thinks i am disrespectful, rude and a snob and she feels like she has a right to say what she wants then what will come out of her mouth about me. Kids hear and pick up on everything. Will she think it is her place to tell the boys about their bio dad? defending him? making him sound better than he is? giving the boys false hopes and mixed up ideas? It will be an ongoing and evolving situation and it is something brian and i will have to decide together.

did i mention i'm at a loss?

I am at a total loss at this moment. I have just seen a glimpse of my future with gee and i am scared! I hope we can continue with his play therapy for the years to come because he is going to need it!
So now that i have you all wondering, let me fill you in on what he has been doing this week and PLEASE let me know if you think i am over reacting and this is normal behavior for a 4 year old. I told you all about the spitting the younger two have been doing this week. I have been at a loss. They have had time-outs, talkings and they have been spitting in the bathroom sink as consequences. Sometimes they will finish with the consequence and minutes later i am told they are doing it again. There we go back to the sink and a talk. So tonight gee brings me a toy bucket and says that banana has spit in it again! It is a lot of spit and i have been suspicious of who is actually doing the spitting since last night. So i go into the room and ask who spit in the bucket. I ask banana, no response. i ask turtle, no response. i ask gee again to tell me. He says banana again and i tell him 'i don't think banana did it'. He says turtle. I tell him 'i don't think turtle did it'. I ask him if he spit in the bucket, no response. I say 'gee, i think you are the one who spit in the bucket.' No response. Then i know that it is him, because believe me if he did not do it, he would be yelling and crying that it was not him! I had him spit in the sink, talked to him and couldn't even deal with the lying at that moment. I was astounded at the lie and the craftiness of the lie. I don't even know how to deal with this right now and i am too angry to deal with it at this moment. I am at a loss. I know kids lie but at this age it seems like the most common lies are to keep themselves out of trouble. I don't know how a child of 4 lies day after day and their goal is to get their brother in trouble. I mean seriously this happened like 4 to 5 times a day, and poor banana and turtle were the ones getting in trouble. I think back and gee was just so smug and had a 'haha' look on his face. He was so happy his brothers were getting into trouble. I am so sad for him, how angry and jealous is he that he would make up this kind of lie and execute it 4 to 5 times daily.
I don't know if it started off as a lie or if the two younger ones were spitting in the beginning and he added some extra incidents in there with the real ones. I just don't know.
It really is a crafty lie. It takes some planning and he totally set up the evidence and everything. He showed me the spit every time. He is very smart. It makes me very sad though....i don't believe him now. It is hard to believe what he tells me and it is something we are going to have to work on. I am happy i blogged about this because it has helped me to realize that if he is smart enough to come up with this little ruse then he is smart enough to understand when i sit him down and talk to him. We will definitely be discussing this in therapy this week and i need to know how exactly to handle this. HE'S ONLY 4! Oh, we have a lot of work to do for this little guy!

that's gross

We are having a problem with spitting. GROSS! The two younger boys are spitting on everything and anything and on each other! I do not know how to get them to stop. We have explained to them that the only appropriate time to spit is when they are brushing their teeth, we spit in the sink. The talks have not worked and timeouts don't seem to work for them either. I am trying something new now - everytime they are caught spitting, they clean the mess they made(washing the toy, using a towel on the floor or brother) and then they get to stand over the sink in the bathroom and spit. !!They do not like this!! Poor banana spits about twice into the sink before he starts crying, turtle spits about 10 times before he has had enough. If anyone has any ideas?!?! I would be happy to try them. We had to clean out two toy buckets today because they decided that was a fun place to spit, oh yeah, a car had to be washed also. It is truly disgusting. I don't know where they get it from, brian is not a spitter; maybe the former foster dad was a spitter. Who knows? maybe it is just something boys do, whatever the reason, it grosses me out and all i have to say is............BOYS!!(as i roll my eyes)lol

i should of known

We rushed through bath time tonight because it is the bio dad's night to call. We had the boys clean up and sit down on the couch. We waited for the call...........15 minutes later we had to explain to the boys that there was not going to be a call tonight. I felt so sad for them. They seemed to handle it okay but i know it had to be extremely upsetting. Grrr, i am so angry! Not only am i angry at the bio dad but at myself because i know better than to tell the kids they are going to get a call or a visit ahead of time. The bio dad has been so good at calling and i just didn't think he would miss his time to call. Wouldn't you know it, it was also the first time we told the kids they were getting a call!! Usually we wait till the phone actually rings before we let them know they are getting a phone call. These things always bite you in the ass when you least expect it. The bio dad said his phone wasn't working and he was trying to call and he finally got his phone to work an hour later and called to let brian know what happened. Who knows? I don't believe a word he says anymore. Once a person lies, it is difficult to believe anything they say, especially when they lie so easily and believably. It is so upsetting when you can't count on an adult to follow through with their responsibilities. How hard is it to call, one night a week!